Five fiberglass figures cling to the wall of an apartment building at 911 Longwood Avenue near Dawson Street. Life-size and brightly colored, the figures depict Thomas, Barbara, Pedro, Pat and Leha – all real people who lived in the neighborhood in the early 1980s.
China Mota, who has lived nearby since 1964, especially remembers Pedro. “It looks just like him,” she says, pointing to the sculpture of a smiling middle-aged mechanic holding a tire under his left arm.
Mota and Pedro were neighbors. “Not real close,” she explains. “Just ‘hello, how are you?’ kind of neighbors.” Pedro was the super of the five-story apartment building that was also home to his storefront tire shop.
Until, according to Mota, Pedro won the lottery and moved to Puerto Rico.
It seems being enshrined on the side of the building was a blessing. “It brought him good luck!” chuckles Mareno Morales, a 73 year-old retired tailor, who, though he didn’t know him personally, heard the story of Pedro and the lottery from his neighbors.
In the 26 years since sculptors John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres created the mural, “Life on Dawson St.” has become a local icon, evoking memories and marking the passage of time.
“It reminds me of my childhood,” says Frances Pimente, stopping by the sculpture as she walks her young boys home from school. “Not that long ago I was crossing the street and I was looking at it and I was like, ‘Wow. It’s been many years that I have been living around here.’”
For John Tyson, another lifelong Longwood resident, the sculpture is a representation of how life used to be.
“It’s a symbol of America,” he mused. “The father working – trying to bring some money home to the family. The mother taking care of the kids, little kids running around, playing games. Every day I come here, I look at that. It reminds me of the old days. It reminds me of when I was small.”
Tyson and Pimente both remember how a crowd would gather to watch the sculpture go up. Though she was very small at the time, Pimente recalls the excitement of watching: “It was amazing. It was something fantastic to see them do that.”
Ahearn and Torres began making fiberglass and plaster casts of Bronx residents in 1979, when Ahearn moved from downtown Manhattan to the Bronx to experiment with his new style of sculpture. He soon met a 19-year-old Torres, who had learned casting while working in his uncle’s religious statue factory.
At first they made casts of local kids for free, as a way to perfect their technique and style, but soon they began to charge. In 1981 they started on the first of three public sculptures in the Longwood neighborhood, all brightly colored portraits, modeled from local residents, and fastened to the exteriors of buildings.
Jose Pizarro remembers how the neighborhood kids loved to hang out by the Dawson St. shop watching the artists at work. One of those kids, Jose’s brother-in-law Felix, is now enshrined in the “We are Family” sculpture on Intervale Avenue and Fox Street, where he holds hands with an old girlfriend.
Even for those whose memories of the neighborhood don’t stretch so far back, “Life on Dawson St.” holds a certain allure and even the promise of renewal. Michelle Hidalgo can see it from the window of Banana Kelly High School where she is a senior.
“I remember the first time I saw it I was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ I think it’s cool how it’s popping out of the building.” Strolling to the subway with books under her arm she adds, “They look happy to me.”
Abdoul Tidjani came to the United States from the West African republic of Togo a year and a half ago. He lives a few blocks from the sculpture and walks by daily on errand runs. How does he like the sculpture? “Tres Bien!” Very good, he says.
However, he thinks it would be nice if they updated it to look more like the Longwood of today, home still to the Puerto Ricans and African Americans depicted in the mural, but now also to new immigrants. He suggests adding more people to the wall.
Jeanine Wiggins comes to Longwood to visit her sister, who owns a home in the neighborhood. When she talks about the sculpture, her face lights up. “When I first looked at it, it captured my heart,” she says.
For Wiggins there is something special about art that represents the people who live in the community. “This area is urban. And they,” she says, gesturing to the wall, “resemble these people. They are not ritzy, they’re not aristocratic, they are just basic urban citizens.”
A version of this story appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Hunts Point Express.